An Education in Malice

by S.T. Gibson

I wondered at their strange intimacy, the way Carmilla had been so clearly chosen out of our cohort as the favorite.

I wondered if Carmilla’s position could be usurped.

I devoured De Lafontaine’s reading list, and I used the inspiration of literature to fuel my own poetry.

I domesticated my own wildness, starved the odd appetites inside me. I remade myself into Laura the saint, Laura who never causes any trouble, Laura who is reliable and dependable, if a little boring.

I followed her silently up the winding staircase to the third floor, where she popped open her door with her shoulder.

And there sat Carmilla, curled up with an open copy of John Donne’s poems in her hands.

“It’s about sex, Laura.”

“In what way?” I shot back. “Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me,” she quoted, with a little flourish of her fingers.

Mine and Carmilla’s, I supposed.

“You’re really very good, you know, Laura,” Carmilla said, her vowels loose from the liquor. I watched, entranced, as her lips formed the shape of my name. “Am I?” I said coolly. “Yes,” she responded, eyes flashing in the dark. “I hate it.”

“Goodnight, Laura,” she said, taking a backwards step away from me, and then another. That infuriating smile was once again fixed on her face. “See you in class.”

I tried to internalize what De Lafontaine had said about needing a foil, a challenger. I imagined Laura and me as jousters, racing headlong on sweating stallions and crashing lances into each other until someone was tossed to the ground.

“No buts, Carmilla. You’ll behave yourself without exception. Any complaints you have you can take up with me after the lesson.

“Your mother left you because she didn’t want you, Carmilla, and you must come to terms with that. You cannot hide for ever in childhood; eventually you must face the facts of life and grow up. I fear that you’ll shrink into a sort of perpetual girlhood. I should call you Petra Pan.”

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. I had to get out of there. “I need some air,”

If I had been asked mere hours before, I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of denying De Lafontaine anything at all.

She could have asked me to catch her a wild rabbit from the school grounds and present it to her with a ribbon around its neck, and I would have gone running through the grass to terrorize the nearest warren. She could have asked me to prick my thumb and pen her a haiku in blood and I would have taken up my paper in one hand and a needle in the other. But being so soundly decimated by her, in front of Laura no less, soured my taste for her.

Inside, I heard muffled voices, Laura saying something low in that shy alto of hers, and then De Lafontaine laughing, like I was a toy she had broken simply because she had grown tired of its tricks.

“To hell with you both,” I hissed, and dashed off into the night.

I caught up with Carmilla halfway to the science building, aptly named for Marie Curie. She was striding with her head dipped down against the cold, wiping at her sniffling nose every so often with the sleeve of her blouse.

“Please, will you slow down?” I asked. “I’m not trying to make fun of you. I’m just…” Dangerously preoccupied with you. Bereft of any sense of pride that might keep me away from you. “Concerned.”

“Ha!” Carmilla barked, winding through the darkened corridors. “Well, nobody asked you to be concerned, Laura.”

My class. I almost scoffed. Carmilla didn’t own an inch of that classroom, it was entirely Ms. De Lafontaine’s domain, and if she thought she was somehow in charge, she was deluding herself.

Teachers like Ms. D only come along once in a lifetime. I would move mountains just to be close to her.”

“Is she really so wonderful?” I challenged. “This woman who brought you to tears not ten minutes ago?” Carmilla let out a brittle bark of a laugh. “You tell me, Laura. You’re still here, aren’t you, still enrolled? You try walking away from her, then come back and lecture me about how easy it is.” There was so much more I wanted to say, but in the end I bit my tongue.

“Things were so boring before you arrived. I’m almost happy you’re here, Laura.” Then, impossibly, she brought our laced fingers to her mouth and kissed my wrist, as though she were sealing a pact. My lips parted in surprise.

After I reached my room, I lay awake in the darkness, my skin feeling too hot and too tight. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was Carmilla’s tearstained face.

My skin prickled at the sound of Carmilla’s name. It was a physiological reaction, uncontrollable and undeniable.

Was there more to Carmilla than her glittering talent, her cutting remarks? Was I looking in the wrong place, trying to riddle her out through her writing?

“I can’t stand New England winters,”

“It’s not winter yet,”

“Ms D doesn’t like them either, but the dean insisted they be part of our curriculum. I doubt she’ll quiz us too ruthlessly on them.”

I once again wondered at her strange closeness with our teacher, who I hadn’t spoken to since the meltdown during our last meeting. De Lafontaine was scarce during the days and held all her classes in the evening, so I assumed that she moonlit at another job during daylight hours. Not that I was particularly looking forward to seeing her again, after how I had run out on our last meeting. Would she be angry with me? Would I have my privileges as one of her special students revoked?

She was, I realized, a bad liar. She was covering for De Lafontaine, for some reason.

Lesbian. She threw the word out so casually, as though anyone might hear her. She seemed completely unbothered by it, as though it were any other noun, and not a total bombshell. I didn’t even use the word to describe myself in my own diary; it seemed too damning.

To my great embarrassment, my eyes started to water.

I let out a relieved laugh and did as she said, sucking the sweet juice from my fingers.

De Lafontaine waited a week after my meltdown to call on me again. She probably thought she was giving me time to cool off, but the neglect just made me even more furious.

To tell the truth, I wasn’t keen on the idea of sitting across the Socratic circle from Laura either. Laura who ate me up with those downturned blue eyes every time I caught her looking my way; Laura who had burrowed so far under my skin that I probably couldn’t dig her out with a knife.

I hated her, no two ways about it, but there was also something about her that made my stomach tighten every time she walked into a room, something that made me want to push her just to see what would happen when she broke, and that unsettled me.

When I finally got her note in my school mailbox, it was terse and to the point.

come Thursday night at quarter till ten, I was standing outside her apartment building, shivering from both the autumn chill and pure anticipation.

I noticed for the thousandth time how long her fingers were, how pronounced her collarbones, how stark the sinews of her neck. She looked like a predator wearing the strained skin of a woman, which, I suppose, is what she was.

“You came,” she said, sounding relieved. “I always come when you ask,”

I closed my eyes and let lines of poetry spill from my lips as De Lafontaine sank her teeth into my neck.

A VAMPIRE

Her own lips were slicked with my blood, and I would have kissed it off her if she’d let me.

“One kiss,” I begged, feeling delirious from the blood loss and her nearness. “There’s no point denying ourselves one kiss.” “That’s a line I won’t cross,”

De Lafontaine wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. Already, the color was coming back into her face. I wondered how long she could go without feeding.

She reached out a hand for me, inviting me to recline against her breast as I had done so many times before, but I flinched away from her.

“That’s putting it lightly. You humiliated me.”